to bless the dancing body
for when we forget to love what was always here
A life truly lived constantly burns away veils of illusion, burns away what is no longer relevant, gradually reveals our essence, until, at last, we are strong enough to stand in our naked truth.
— Marion Woodman
In my practice, I see the ways the body is the ground for personal dissonance and cultural poverties. It often holds polarization: one part wants this, one part want another thing. It holds tension, “I want to be more myself, but I’m afraid I’ll become invisible/unloved.” It holds the pull between authentic expression and perceived safety. It holds truth: the thing you are not ready to say, the move you know you need to make, the reality you were punished for seeing. More than anything, and especially for women, the body is tied to worth and is a thing to make more attractive in socially sanctioned ways. Women learn this before we learn the language for emotion, for desire, for boundaries, and for our inner world. Instead of soul tools we are given the tools of culture: moderate, please, optimize, inject, smooth, shrink.
I see this in the way women place themselves in front of me in session, shifting their bodies to sit a certain way, with foreheads so shiny I can see myself reflected back like a mirror. They share piercing judgment oriented towards any imperfection. And they hold the burden of disembodiment because no one offered them a map or the tools to inhabit themselves fully and without apology. In these bodies, there are walls around intuition, feeling, and the raw, messy truth they have not been allowed to express. These women often have a history of abuse and disordered eating, or the opposite, intense praise for performance and perfection.
There is harm done to people who feel deeply in families where feeling means knowing that something is wrong, and that wrongness points to a truth the system cannot hold. Bodies that feel deeply are inconvenient bodies. And bodies that do not submit to current trends regarding attractiveness or beauty are marginalized, ostracized and shamed. This hurts and it requires attention, accompaniment and conscious connection.
I often wonder about the fine line between personal responsibility and systemic change. That line can be cloudy, blurred. What I do know is that developing a well relationship to soma is the first step on the journey to embodiment and embodiment is the pathway to an alive and radical human experience. It is a countercultural act to love your skin the way it is. And to tend to it—to love the body into trust and relationship without that loving secretly meaning it needs to look a different way—is tender, scary, and often the place I meet people in.
Sometimes my clients ask me why do this, why go through the ordeal/intensity/reckoning of inhabiting the body, of learning to feel?
My answer changes, but usually it’s something like: because it’s our first language and our human heirloom. It is the thing that brings us into being. Everything we are in truth is on the other side feeling what we are resisting. Further, direct experience through the body is the only reality that we can count on and without truly inhabiting this physical form we miss out on the miracle, the whole point. Which is to be a body having a human experience, to be conscious to soul and soma, and to be awake to the place where those two things become the same thing.
Image: margaret morris dance academy
There is a certain magic that happens with dance. The type of movement that arises intuitively, without force or performance, that helps you access feeling, and that reminds you of the awe of having a body. This blessing arose from that place. It is for you if you know what it’s like to feel disconnected from your first house. It’s for you if you sense that an open heart could be the antidote to the many harms of the world. And this is for you if you intuit that dance helps you go down and in, towards depth and your naked truth.
To Bless the Dancing Body
this was always the way of things
before we traded flesh for insight and purity
we knew the unbound flesh, the wild body
we knew that this form was a channel to a deeper truth
and that sensation, emotion, and aliveness are teachers from the greater order of things.
may you remember that this dancing, imperfect, charismatic form waits
for you under everything you have learned
may the shackles of judgment shatter around you
from the wreckage, may an old friend emerge
compassionate, wild, and alive with presence.
may you free yourself from performance
may you free yourself from a beauty governed by the times and not the soul
here, in the morning light, may you come to remember what was always here
your birthright: your messy, miraculous, dancing body
may you dance free
may you find more of yourself in the movement
may you feel your body in mountain, wind storm, and still water
may you find awe in the miracle of your form and
may you become courageous enough to move like the seasons
from decomposition and stillness to audacious bloom.